Readers draw parallels between Irish potato famine, US economy

Thursday

Sep 27, 2012 at 12:01 AMSep 27, 2012 at 1:38 PM

“Many people who have read my book have said – without any prompting from me – that it reminds them of things that are going on now. Our modern arguments about welfare, entitlements, taxes and immigration really began with the Irish famine,” he said.

Valerie A. Russo

For the past 13 years, the career of author John Kelly has been one disaster after another.

In 1999, HE wrote “Three on the Edge,” a true story about families facing catastrophic illness. In 2005, he wrote “The Great Mortality,” a history of the medieval plague.

His latest book, “The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People,” was published in August.

“I’ve always had an interest in history,” said Kelly, who majored in history at Boston University. “And there’s a lot of inherent drama in disasters. You don’t have to bang on the piano keys. The things that are happening are awful enough.”

No one asked Kelly to write about the Irish potato famine, the worst disaster of the 19th century in terms of lives lost – more than 1 million people. He just wanted to find out what really happened.

“I read a number of books on the famine. The most famous book, ‘The Great Hunger,’ by Cecil Woodham-Smith, was great in terms of its detail, but I never got any overarching theme except that the British were bad and the Irish were long suffering. It seemed to me there was lot more going on, but I didn’t know how it all fit together,” he said.

In the first year of the famine, 1845-1846, a fungus caused Ireland to lose 25 percent of its potato crop. Holland lost 70 percent, and the Flanders area of Belgium lost 92 percent. In the summer of 1846, Ireland lost 90 percent – about the same percentage Flanders lost the previous year. But a million people didn’t perish in Flanders. So why did they die in Ireland?

“It had to do with the mechanisms of relief in Ireland,” Kelly said.

In the 397-page hardcover book, Kelly explains how the free market philosophy of British officials affected taxes and relief projects during the heart of the famine, 1845-1847, and led to the emigration of 2 million Irish citizens to the U.S., Canada and other countries between 1845 and 1855.

“The British thought the Irish had a terrible dependence on government and did not want to give them free food. In the midst of a terrible crop failure, they set up an elaborate public works program, which was designed to make people work for their food. But the people working on them were exhausted and starving, so they died,” Kelly said.

He added, “The British government also turned over responsibility for feeding the Irish to the free market. The merchants were supposed to compete against each other to keep prices low, but that didn’t happen. Irish merchants made a killing selling food to the local relief committees, who were ordered to sell at market prices. The poor couldn’t afford to buy the food, and that’s when mass deaths set in. In March of 1847, the British decided to set up a nationwide system of soup kitchens – feeding people for free, which is what they should have done from the beginning.”

It wasn’t just starvation that killed people during the Irish famine. Seven out of 10 deaths were caused by typhus and famine fever, which broke out six to eight months after the second crop failure in 1846.

“To lower their poor tax payments, Anglo/Irish landowners evicted tenants, so there were lots of people in transit,” Kelly said. “Hygiene standards fell because of the chaos. Quite a few upper-middle-class people died of typhus, and the poor got something called famine relapsing.”

Kelly began work on the book five years ago, before the disastrous credit crisis and stock market crash in the fall of 2008. He made three research trips to Ireland, spending two weeks at a time at the National Archives and National Library in Dublin. He read articles in British and Irish newspapers published during the famine years, as well as Irish and British Relief Commission papers – all told, 8,000 letters and memos.

This book is a compelling read because Kelly weaves in both pertinent facts and anecdotes about poor farmers, sick children, self-serving Anglo/Irish landlords and free market-leaning government officials to tell the story.

“There were times I got really depressed,” Kelly said. “In the last chapter, there’s this anecdote about a lame 12-year-old Irish boy who came over to England in March of 1847. They British were deporting the Irish like crazy. The boy was recovering from famine fever, so they put him on the boat by the engine, the warmest part of the deck. The crowds pushed him onto the cold main deck, where he died. That affected me – the utter helplessness. His story was heartbreaking and the perfect metaphor for 19th-century Ireland under British rule.”

Kelly sent advance copies of “The Graves Are Walking,” to several people whose work he admired, including former President Bill Clinton, who surprised the author by writing a blurb for the back cover:

“John Kelly gives heartbreaking detail to the Great Famine that seared itself into the memory of the Irish people, and shed fascinating new light on the policy decisions that made it even worse. ‘The Graves Are Walking’ is a cautionary tale for all who would risk calamity – human, economic, or ecological – in the name of scoring an ideological victory,” Clinton wrote.

Kelly, who has neither met nor spoken with Clinton, explained how it happened.

“My wife knew somebody at his office and she sent it to him. Somebody from the foundation contacted me to let me know that Clinton liked the book and was going to write something about it. Four or five weeks later, the blurb came,” Kelly said.

Clinton was not the only reader to find parallels between the Irish famine and our current economic problems.

“Many people who have read my book have said – without any prompting from me – that it reminds them of things that are going on now. Our modern arguments about welfare, entitlements, taxes and immigration really began with the Irish famine,” he said.

The British response to the Irish famine is the first example of modern disaster capitalism, Kelly said. Other examples include the crises in Latin America during the 1970s and ‘80s and in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, when entitlements were immediately cut back and a free market established to deregulate the economy.

“The population is so dazed by the crisis, it’s easy to implement radical reform,” he said. “Disaster capitalism has been used a lot; it’s the tea party argument. It has failed repeatedly, but people keep trying it over and over again.”